Lorenz Mäder, founder of Wakatobi Dive Resort, outlines his vision for how to create and sustain a successful tourist venture that protects the ocean
Interview by
There’s nothing bad about money,’ says Lorenz Mäder, Swiss founder of Wakatobi, a resort in an extremely isolated region of Southeast Sulawesi in Indonesia. ‘As long as you make good use of it.’
And in the past 28 years, he has made extremely good use of it, building up a world-class scuba diving and snorkelling resort that has used its financial strength to transform the health of its surrounding reefs and marine life. Soft-spoken, but with a no-nonsense demeanour, Mäder takes a forthright and outspoken line on how conservation works in practice.
Since it first opened in 1995, Wakatobi has become a model for sustainable ecotourism, although ‘sustainable’ is perhaps not quite sufficient to describe the impact that the resort has had on the local coral reefs. They haven’t just been sustained – they’ve been significantly improved.
‘Wakatobi’ is an amalgamation of the names of the four largest islands of what was formerly known as the Tukangbesi Archipelago – Wangi-wangi, Kaledupa, Tomia and Binongko – which lie off the southeastern coast of the Indonesian province of Southeast Sulawesi. Wakatobi National Park was established in 1996 and now covers 1.4 million hectares, around 65 per cent of which is coral reef. In 2003, the four islands were incorporated into a single new government district and officially named ‘Wakatobi’.
The resort is built on a small island separated from the western shore of the island of Tomia by a narrow, shallow channel. Mäder’s commitment to the environment is clear from the moment Wakatobi comes into sight. The central longhouse, constructed using traditional Indonesian methods and materials, looks very much at home within its surroundings, backed by a jungle of palm trees and fronted by a white sand beach.
The bungalows and private villas are well placed within the resort. Overlooking nothing but the ocean and without even a hint of any other large-scale civilisation for miles around, the site is the very definition of secluded. The eco-friendly aesthetics, however, are only a small part of Wakatobi’s story. Far from simply being a dive and snorkel resort, the establishment was founded upon environmental conservation principles by working in partnership with the indigenous population – the Wakatobi Collaborative Reef Conservation Program.
Put simply, in return for the locals not fishing in certain locations, and not using destructive fishing methods such as dynamite and cyanide, Wakatobi pays to lease stretches of reef, provides employment opportunities and supplies the village with electricity and freshwater. ‘From the first day,’ says Mäder, ‘it has been a business agreement. That stops the destruction, because it’s money. Everybody understands that.’
The collaboration is part of the reason behind the premium pricing of Wakatobi. ‘You can do more with one person paying US$1,000 dollars than you can with ten people paying US$100 each,’ Mäder says.
Mäder’s drive towards conservation came from previous experience in other Asian locations where the development of mass tourism caused a deterioration in the local environment. ‘The usual experience [is that], 95 per cent of people return to a place and say it’s not as good as before,’ he says. ‘And that sucks.’
It’s a common worldwide phenomenon – as areas in developing countries gather popularity as tourist destinations, the locals take advantage of the ecosystems on which they survive to improve their lot in life. Land is sold for development, fish are caught to supply restaurants, trees are cut for building materials, and in a very short space of time, what was once a tropical paradise becomes an inexpensive tourist hotspot. The surrounding reefs, already threatened by a changing climate, are subjected to a pressure that has seen many of them imperilled, devoid of fish and home only to broken coral and suffocating algae.
‘Too many move in, then they compete on price, but don’t spend money on the environment,’ says Mäder. ‘We have paid millions of dollars since we were here. It’s crazy. It’s money we could have used to buy fancy boats or whatever.’
Millions isn’t an exaggeration. The 24-hour power supply extends to all of the homes that house the 500-strong population of the island’s Lamanggau village; the freshwater is provided by Wakatobi Resort’s own desalination plant; 300 locals are employed by the resort and the collaboration extends to all 17 villages in the regional subdistrict. Schools, conservation projects and patrols of the reef and fishing areas are all sponsored by Wakatobi Resort – and there’s the resort’s private airstrip, which brings tourists and supplies twice a week to Pulau Tomia on board a 70-seat propeller-driven aircraft.
This is all a far cry from 1994, when Mäder first arrived on the island. With no electricity, no engines, no transportation beyond hand-crafted fishing boats, he describes feeling as if he were ‘back in the 18th century.’ He had been inspired to visit after reading in a copy of Lonely Planet about the province of Southeast Sulawesi (which is the size of Switzerland). ‘There was an outline of the province and one sentence,’ he recalls. ‘“SE Sulawesi is so difficult to reach and nobody goes there and that’s why we don’t write about it.” Full stop.’
Mäder spoke with local village chiefs to find out who was prepared to work with him. With his background in marine biology, he also researched local environmental conditions to determine which location would best suit his dream of building a sustainable resort. ‘I didn’t want it to be like other places I worked,’ he said. ‘You know – go there, and after two years it’s gone.’
Communication with the locals wasn’t always easy. The majority of the native population speak Bahasa Indonesian – which Mäder himself had learned – but a very important ethnic minority, the Bajau, do not. Known as the ‘Sea Gypsies’, the Bajau people depend almost entirely on the ocean for their existence, and would need to become partners with a vested interest in Mäder’s project, or it may have been doomed to failure before it started.
In what he describes as a ‘stroke of luck’, Mäder found not only a village chief who was prepared to work with him, but a perfect location for his coral-regeneration initiative to take hold. Where the Banda and Flores seas meet, cold Antarctic currents drive upwellings of nutrients and coral larvae against Wakatobi’s coastline, creating a perfect combination of sea conditions and sustenance for the growth of reef-building species of coral.
According to Mäder, when he first arrived, the tops of those reefs were nothing more than ‘bare rocks’, upon which, at low tide, 300 people or more would be walking and ‘reef gleaning’ – collecting what resources they could while the reef remained accessible. There was a significant amount of damage to the coral reefs through poor fishing practices, including ‘bomb holes’ made by blast fishing, a practice learned during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during the Second World War, and which had continued using the stores of dynamite left behind after Japan’s surrender.
Most of the holes are no longer visible and it’s difficult to apportion blame to the local population. The native Indonesians had no choice in the matter during the Japanese occupation, and little was known at that time about the long-term impact of human activity on the underwater world. For many such populations across the globe, using natural resources required for survival takes priority over the preservation of an ecosystem that had previously required no special measures to sustain.
Furthermore, much of the damage to the reefs and fish populations of Wakatobi was caused by mass fishing operations from other nations, which took vast quantities of stocks unchecked, with sharks – prized for their fins across the Asian markets – being particularly vulnerable. A 2014 report from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography suggests that overfishing from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s saw such a decline in numbers that Wakatobi’s own fishermen were travelling more than 800 kilometres to exploit shark populations in Australian waters.
These days, the current Indonesian fisheries minister is sinking boats deemed to be fishing illegally, but in the ‘lawless’ 1960s and ’70s, nobody knew the damage they might be causing – and nobody really cared.
It took two-and-a-half years of working with the local villagers before things started to turn around on Wakatobi’s reefs. It took considerable effort from Mäder to convince the fishermen that his expertise was worth listening to, and his constant attention was required to ensure that his ideas were put into practice.
‘It’s not just about throwing money at people and hoping for the best,’ says Mäder. ‘You have to control it. You give the money, you have an agreement and you check every day.’ One of his first initiatives was to persuade the local fishermen to close 40 per cent of their fishing grounds to maximise yield over time. Needless to say, this was an unpopular request, but after fish stocks improved significantly over the following four years, the fishermen became his best line of defence.
Once Mäder had them on his side, they were more amenable to listening to his ‘cool tips’, as he calls them, which included putting a halt to the practice of chopping up crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) for use as fish bait. COTS are voracious coral predators and population booms can have a devastating impact on the environment, but they are capable of regenerating from just half of their bodies, and cutting up the extraordinarily fecund females can deposit millions of eggs across a small space of reef. Mäder also persuaded the villagers to stop using a poison for fishing made from the roots of the tuba tree, which, when crushed, release a neurotoxin similar in potency to cyanide. It kills fish and coral, but may also have been causing brain damage to the fishermen and the children who were swimming in the tainted water.
Education alone, according to Mäder, isn’t enough to ensure a sustainable programme of conservation. Preservation for the future isn’t an easy concept to understand for people who live hand-to-mouth. Although educational programmes are an essential part of the Collaborative Reef Conservation Program, they are only valuable, he argues, when run in parallel with the financial aspect of the effort.
‘You have to work together with the locals. Every day. You have to be there. You have to build the trust. You have to be on-site,’ says Mäder. ‘Don’t try to just go to schools and teach them about beautiful fish and all that. If there’s no conservation already happening, everything will be gone before the kids are grown up,’ he says. ‘It’s not so important at first that everybody understands what it’s all about. But you have to start somewhere. What they understand immediately is business.’
Mäder runs the business with the help of his brother Valentin. Both are scathing about the activities of some NGOs, which, as Mäder puts it, ‘come out here, cruise around on a boat, have a fun trip for two weeks and go back,’ after which they ‘throw some money’ at local initiatives. ‘That’s not how it works,’ he says.
The relationships and business arrangements made with the various local communities need to be monitored on a continual basis. Mäder has a permanent residence on the island, from where he oversees the technology, construction and politics involved in maintaining a stable relationship with the local villagers to ensure progress.
To the untrained eye, the results of the conservation programme may not be immediately obvious. This might sound like an unflattering comment to make in light of Wakatobi’s long-term efforts, but is actually one of the greatest compliments that could be given to its success.
The evidence is observable in the health of the coral reefs, particularly in the shallower water, where the impacts of human activity are most destructive. At these depths, much of the slower-growing species of brain coral, porites and gorgonian fans are a lot smaller than they would be if a reef had remained genuinely untouched for centuries.They look, in fact, as if they have been growing for about 25 years. The reef tops, which were ‘bare rock’ when Mäder arrived, are filled with the faster-growing staghorn and table corals, and – importantly – seagrass. The latter has suffered an even worse fate than coral in recent years, yet here has re-established a presence on the reef plates. The reefs today are rich and extremely diverse, but there is still a lack of larger pelagic species due to historical overfishing. Some sharks, however – particularly whitetip and blacktip reef sharks – are now beginning to return.
There is little evidence of past destruction to the reef beyond the smaller size of shallow-water corals. Some damage is present but appears to be mostly natural, especially near the surface. There, strong seas can snap some of the more fragile species, but without being pulverised by the repetitive mechanical action of human activity, the likes of table corals continue to grow in situ if left unmolested. Clear indications of a natural ‘avalanche effect’ were present in some locations – the result of a tree, perhaps, collapsing into the water and sliding down the steep-sided reef walls.
The only real blight that was noticeable from below the surface was a large area of dead and bleached coral at a single reef, but its localised nature suggested the presence of a destructive biological agent – such as the aforementioned COTS – rather than the much more widespread coral bleaching events caused by elevated water temperatures.
On land, the resort keeps its ecological footprint small. No chemicals or pesticides that might damage the reef through run-off are used within its boundaries, and Wakatobi’s house reef – where one might expect the greatest footfall and potential for damage – is positively thriving, home to a large expanse of seagrass kept well-trimmed by regular green turtle visits.
In the evening, as if to highlight the reef’s health, a single brightly glowing trail appeared directly over the drop-off, to be joined a few moments later by a second, then a third, and then myriad. How the source – a tiny, almost microscopic species of shrimp – can eject such a huge volume of bioluminescent fluid from its body remains one of nature’s mysteries, but within 30 minutes, their trails caused the entire edge of the drop-off to glow as far as the eye could see – a perfect mirror to the starlit skies above.
To the travelling scuba divers and snorkellers who form the majority of Wakatobi’s trade, the resort and its surrounding reefs are an idyllic slice of paradise that few would ever consider as having once been on the point of destruction.
There are trade-offs, however, and some may be tempted to question the environmental impact of the aircraft that ferries tourists and supplies to Wakatobi, or the diesel generators that power the resort, the village and the desalination facility.
It’s an arduous journey without the small turboprop aeroplane, however, and without the income from visitors and the benefits that the villagers receive as a result of Wakatobi’s business strategy, there would be no incentive for the locals to take ownership of the necessity for conservation of the local reefs. It‘s a delicate balance, and one that Mäder is keen to address.
‘There’s always negative impact, there always is, it’s just human nature,’ he says. ‘But if we can improve more than we destroy, if the impact balance is on the positive side, then we can win, long term.’
With its beautiful, secluded location surrounded by vibrant, healthy coral reefs, all set in an extremely welcoming environment, Wakatobi Resort serves as an excellent model for sustainable ecotourism.
It would appear that – long-term – Wakatobi is, indeed, winning.
